Gyrth:If Harold had won the Battle of Hastings then most likely there wouldn't have been the need for the Magna Carta. In Anglo-Saxon society women had basic rights, even the right to divorce if their man could not satisfy them - true. The Normans were horrible caretakers of England.

"What ifs?" love them... :-)

No Norman conquest of England -> no Norman invasions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales.

The Normans instead turn south in search of conquest, systematically dismantling the Byzantine Empire. By 1185 they besiege and take Constantinople and establish a state there--Bohemond I is crowned Emperor. The resulting Norman Dynasty ruled the Empire until 1918, and combined the administrative machinery of the Byzantines, and Arabs with their own conceptions of feudal law and order to forge a unique government. Under this state, there was great religious freedom, and alongside the Norman nobles existed a meritocratic bureaucracy of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The Normans reexpands the Empire eastward, taking Anatolia and expanding to the borders of Armenia, later turning south to take with is now Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. It was from Cyprus that many of the later Crusades were launched into the Holy Land by western European nobles, and the Norman Byzantine rulers managed to successfully steer these nobles toward Arab conquest and away from their own lands. In the west, they were able to strengthen the hold of the Empire on the Balkans. It was however in their wars with the Ottoman Turks (early 1300s to mid-1400s that the Normans had their finest hour, successfully turning back the Otttomans through a series of brutal wars, culminating the victory of Robert VIII over Murad II in 1444 at the Battle of Alexandretta.